


Subjunctive

by Assimbya



Category: The Library at Mount Char - Scott Hawkins
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 19:10:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9004387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Assimbya/pseuds/Assimbya
Summary: Rachel and Carolyn have a disagreement about choices.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [comradeocean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/comradeocean/gifts).



> I loved my recipient's prompt about exploring the experiences in training of some of the other Librarians, and so this is a very small snippet about Rachel, who I was really intrigued by and wanted a lot more of in the novel. I hope it is enjoyed.
> 
> Contains discussion of child harm/child death, in keeping with canon. No descriptions.

“What if I don’t want to have children?” Rachel asked. It was a petulant question, but she was twelve and frustrated and not yet as afraid as she should have been.

“You will,” Father said, friendly, jovial, “in this continuity or another. Not yet. But in a few years. Who do you think you’ll fancy for their father? Richard? Peter? Likely not Michael. You could alternate, if you like.”

Rachel made a face, before she’d thought about it. “I don’t want to have children with any of them. None of the others have to.”

“It’s not their catalog,” Father’s voice was still mild, but Rachel was beginning to fear that she’d overstepped, “it is yours. What do you think children are, except how we project ourselves into the future? You can’t extend beyond yourself without them.”

She exhaled slowly, trying to quiet her frustration, trying to avoid being accused of a lack of motivation. “I’m trying to understand. I’m working at it.”

“You won’t understand until you’ve done it,” Father reached out to ruffle her hair, “I couldn’t understand till I had children myself. You can see futures in them. Genes combining, one way or another, multitudinous possibilities waiting to unfold. You’ll see.”

“And then they die.”

“No, Rachel,” he smiled at her, “and then you kill them.”

“And then I kill them. Here I kill them. But they still exist. In the other possibilities.”

“Everything still exists,” Father spoke slowly, as if explaining this to a child. Which he was doing. She was a child, she supposed, even if she wasn’t sure she had felt like one since Adoption Day.

“I would be killing them - and not. They wouldn’t really be dead. It wouldn’t be permanent. I would still have their ghosts.”

“That’s true.”

“What would happen if I didn’t?”

“We can look at that, once you’ve done it. We can look at how everything would be.”

Rachel nodded slowly. “What do I do next?”

What she really wanted to ask was if Father would kill them, his children, just as she was meant to kill hers. But she didn’t. It was a stupid question. She had already seen Margaret die a good few times. Maybe it wasn’t quite the same with the rest of them, but something in her bones made her certain that Father did everything he taught, fully and completely. He would kill all them, in some past or some future. He would try all the possibilities.

“Now,” he told her, “you have more to study.”

-

“I’ve realized,” Carolyn said, not looking up from her book as she said it, “that you almost always use the subjunctive.”

Rachel felt unsettled, as she tended to when Carolyn talked. “Should I know what that means?”

“Probably.” Carolyn turned a page. “It’s technically part of my catalog, but you’d learn it in any American school. It’s the way we talk about things that aren’t certain - something that might happen, something that’s possible, something you want. You use it all the time, as if nothing you say is a fact.”

Rachel absently pulled at her hair, trying to work out what she had just heard. “But...there _aren’t_ any facts, Carolyn. They don’t exist.”

“Ha.” It was a laugh; more like a short bark of an exhale. “That wasn’t subjunctive. See.”

“No, but really. There are always more possibilities. Each time we make a choice, some part of us, somewhere, makes a different one. Certainty isn’t a real thing.”

Something in that made Carolyn close her book and look at Rachel. “That’s what you see, when you look at the future. Alternate possibilities?”

Rachel felt dizzy, looked away. “I shouldn’t tell you.”

“Your catalog.”

“You wouldn’t understand if I did. If you were to see everything that I see, it would paralyze you. You couldn’t make decisions. It’s important, I think - I feel - that you should maintain a linear relationship with time.”

Carolyn opened the book again. “Don’t talk that way; we don’t make choices. We’re here to learn.”

She was scared of something, Rachel realized. There was something she was worried Rachel could see. She couldn’t see it, whatever it was; her the contents of her catalog were the branching paths the future could take, not the minds of people in the present. But for a moment the different versions of Carolyn she had encountered seemed to split, layering like the multiple image of an unfocused gaze. There was some choice that Carolyn had yet to make; Rachel could see that. Once it was made, paths would close. She couldn’t understand what that meant, couldn’t make sense of it, and certainly couldn’t offer Carolyn anything to make it easier.

Father must know. Father must be helping her with it.

“You’re right,” she said softly, “we are here to learn. You’re very good at that.”

“Thank you, Rachel.”

It was a dismissal, and Rachel felt lightly bereft. She reached for the ghosts around them, drew a few of them towards her. Their love was unstinting. It could hardly be otherwise.

Carolyn would make whatever choice she needed to make in her time.

-

Everyone made choices, but everyone was also the object of everyone else’s. Rachel understood that. She thought the other Librarians didn’t, really. So many of them were desperately trying to pretend that they controlled their choices more than they did, while Carolyn seemed to be living her life sitting as quiet as possible as if in the hopes that everyone could forget that she was making choices at all. It was perplexing.

Rachel could make choices, but know that she was always, somewhere else, making different ones. It took some of the responsibility off. It also meant that no change she made could be permanent. Her children, her emissaries into the future, had to be ended, their lives stopped up, Rachel’s own influence negated. And she did that. She made herself into a closed circuit, that saw but could not act. It was okay. She wasn’t alone, because she had the ghosts there with her in it. She didn’t worry, not so much as the others. There was a lot to see, in the alternative futures. Good things as well as bad. Sometimes, she got to see her children grow up. Sometimes she got to see herself living a different life.

Carolyn was very alone, Rachel thought. But there wasn’t much she could do about that.


End file.
